Zhao Weiguo was just the man to lead Tsinghua Unigroup and China's big push into semiconductors — until he wasn't.
Illustration by Luis Grañena
In April 2018, Zhao Weiguo, the chief executive of Tsinghua Unigroup, took Chinese President Xi Jinping on a tour of a semiconductor facility in Wuhan. At the time, Unigroup, the partially-state-owned semiconductor company, was five years into its aggressive campaign to design and manufacture more advanced chips — a campaign inspired, in large part, by Xi’s wish to sever China’s reliance on foreign suppliers. The photo op of the two men strolling in matching white lab coats seemed to offer
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